At £11.01 it costs many times more than the next most expensive one I’ve brought up until now. But up until now I’ve only been buying SciFi books.

A Year Without Pants is an ‘inside’ view of working within Automattic, the private company behind the WordPress.com website. Automattic is unique in the way it operates. All staff are remote employees, and the management hierarchy is incredibly flat.

This is of particular interest to me as I’ve been pretty much constantly over-subscribed with work in my business for about the last 4 months. I need to change how the business works, and one obvious possible change would be to spread the workload over more people than just me!

I’ve only read about 30% of the book so far, but can say it’s very well written, with a very easy to read style, and a good mix of humour and information.

I’m stunned, so far, at how different Automattic’s structure is – especially compared to the many Investment Banks I’ve worked with in the past. And yet Automattic continues to operate in an incredibly lean way and consistently pushes out reasonably high quality product.

There’s lots to learn from Automattic, and I’m looking forward to digging deeper. And I recommend A Year Without Pants by Scott Berkun to anyone interested in exploring new models of employing staff.